Romantic Art Style (c.1770-1920)

The Lady of Shalott (1888)
Tate Collection, London.
By John William Waterhouse.

What is Romanticism?
- Characteristics

Despite the early efforts of pioneers like
El Greco (Domenikos Theotocopoulos)
(1541-1614), Adam Elsheimer
(1578-1610) and Claude Lorrain
(1604-82), the style we know as Romanticism did not gather momentum until
the end of the 18th century when the heroic element in Neoclassicism was
given a central role in painting.
This heroic element combined with revolutionary idealism to produce an
emotive Romantic style, which emerged in the wake of the French Revolution
as a reaction against the restrained academic
art of the arts establishment. The tenets of romanticism included:
a return to nature - exemplified by an emphasis on spontaneous plein-air
painting - a belief in the goodness of humanity, the promotion of justice
for all, and a strong belief in the senses and emotions, rather than reason
and intellect. Romantic painters and sculptors tended to express an emotional
personal response to life, in contrast to the restraint and universal
values advocated by Neoclassical art.
19th Century architects, too, sought to express a sense of Romanticism
in their building designs: see, for instance, Victorian
architecture (1840-1900).

Among the greatest Romantic painters were
Henry Fuseli (1741-1825), Francisco Goya (1746-1828), Caspar David Friedrich
(1774-1840), JMW Turner (1775-1851), John Constable (1776-1837), Theodore
Gericault (1791-1824) and Eugene Delacroix (1798-63). Romantic art did
not displace the Neoclassical style, but rather functioned as a counterbalance
to the latter's severity and rigidity. Although Romanticism declined about
1830, its influence continued long after. NOTE: To see the role that Romantic
painting played in the evolution of 19th century art, see: Realism
to Impressionism (1830-1900).

Origins

After the French Revolution of 1789, a
significant social change occurred within a single generation. Europe
was shaken by political crises, revolutions and wars. When leaders met
at the Congress of Vienna (1815) to reorganise European affairs after
the Napoleonic Wars, it became clear that the peoples' hopes for 'liberty,
equality and fraternity' had not been realized. However, during the course
of those agitated 25 years, new ideas and attitudes had taken hold in
the minds of men.

Respect for the individual, the responsible
human being, which was already a key element in Neoclassical
painting, had given rise to a new but related phenomenon - emotional
intuition. Thus cool, rational Neoclassicism was now confronted with emotion
and the individual imagination which sprang from it. Instead of praising
the stoicism and intellectual discipline of the individual (Neoclassicism),
artists now also began to celebrate the emotional intuition and perception
of the individual (Romanticism). Thus at the beginning of the 19th century,
a variety of styles began to emerge - each shaped by national characteristics
- all falling under the heading of 'Romanticism'.

The movement began in Germany where it
was motivated largely by a sense of world weariness ("Weltschmerz"),
a feeling of isolation and a yearning for nature. Later, Romantic tendencies
also appeared in English and French painting.

In Germany, the young generation of artists
reacted to the changing times by a process of introspection: they retreated
into the world of the emotions - inspired by a sentimental yearning for
times past, such as the Medieval era, which was now seen as a time in
which men had lived in harmony with themselves and the world. In this
context, the painting Gothic Cathedral by the Water by Karl Friedrich
Schinkel, was just as important as the works of the 'Nazarenes'
- Friedrich Overbeck, Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld and Franz Pforr -
who took their lead from the pictorial traditions of the Italian Early
Renaissance and the German art of the age of Albrecht Durer. In their
recollection of the past, Romantic artists were very close to Neoclassicism,
except that their historicism was critical of the rationalist attitude
of Neoclassicism. To put it simply, Neoclassical artists looked to the
past in support of their preference for responsible, rational-minded individuals,
while Romantics looked to the past to justify their non-rational emotional
intuition.

The Romantic movement promoted 'creative
intuition and imagination' as the basis of all art. Thus the work of art
became an expression of a 'voice from within', as the leading Romantic
painter Caspar
David Friedrich (1774-1840) put it. But this new subjectivity (unlike
that of the contemporary age) did not entail neglect of the study of nature,
or painting craftsmanship. On the contrary: Romantic artists retained
the academic traditions of their art, indeed their painterly qualities
still represent a highpoint of Western art.

The preferred genre among Romanticists
was landscape painting.
Nature was seen as the mirror of the soul, while in politically restricted
Germany it was also regarded as a symbol of freedom and boundlessness.
Thus the iconography of Romantic art includes solitary figures set in
the countryside, gazing longingly into the distance, as well as vanitas
motifs such as dead trees and overgrown ruins, symbolizing the transience
and finite nature of life. Similar vanitas
painting motifs had occurred previously in Baroque
art: indeed Romantic painters borrowed the painterly treatment of
light, with its tenebrist effects of light and shade, directly from the
Baroque masters. In Romanticism, the painter casts his subjective eye
on the objective world, and shows us a picture filtered through his sensibility.

By the time the European Restoration was
set in motion by the Carlsbad Resolutions (1819), and the persecution
of the demagogues commenced, the appetite for German Romanticism had already
faded, and rebellion had been replaced by resignation and disappointment.
The emancipatory aspirations of German Romanticism were set aside in favour
of those of the Restoration. In the face of such political conservatism,
the artist-citizen withdrew into his private idyll, ushering in the Biedermeier
period (1815-1848) of Late Romanticism, exemplified by the works of Moritz
von Schwind (1804-71), Adrian Ludwig Richter (1803-1884), and Carl
Spitzweg (1805-85). Spitzweg was perhaps the outstanding representative
of the Biedermeier style: narrative, anecdotal
family scenes were among his favourite pictorial themes, although his
cheerful and peaceful paintings have a deeper meaning. Behind his innocent
prettiness, he is satirizing the materialism of the German bourgeoisie.
See also: German Art, 19th
Century.

Spanish Romanticism
(1810-30)

Francisco
de Goya (1746-1828) was the undisputed leader of the Romantic art
movement in Spain, demonstrating a natural flair for works of irrationality,
imagination, fantasy and terror. By 1789, he was firmly established as
official painter to the Spanish Royal court. Unfortunately, about 1793,
he was afflicted by some kind of serious illness, which left him deaf
and caused him to become withdrawn. During his convalescence (17931794),
he executed a set of 14 small paintings on tin, known as Fantasy and
Invention, which mark a complete change of style, depicting a dramatic
world of fantasy and nightmare. In 1799, he published a set of 80 etchings
entitled Los Caprichos commenting on a range of human behaviours
in the manner of William Hogarth. In 1812-15, in the aftermath of the
Napoleonic War, he completed a set of aquatint prints called The Disasters
of War depicting scenes from the battlefield, in a disturbing and
macabre fashion. The prints remained unpublished until 1863. In 1814,
in commemoration of the Spanish insurrection against French troops at
the Puerta del Sol, Madrid, and the shooting of unarmed Spaniards suspected
of complicity, Goya produced one of his greatest masterpieces - The
Third of May, 1808 (1814, Prado, Madrid). Another masterpiece
is The Colossus
(1808-12, Prado, Madrid). After 1815 Goya became increasingly withdrawn.
His series of 14 pictures known as the Black Paintings (1820-23),
including Saturn
Devouring His Son (1821, Prado, Madrid), offer an extraordinary
insight into his world of personal fantasy and imagination.

French Romanticism
(1815-50)

In France, as in much of Europe, the Napoleonic
Wars ended in exile for Napoleon and a reactionary wave of Restoration
policies. The French republic once again became a monarchy. In fine art
terms, all this led to a huge boost for Romanticism, hitherto restrained
by the domination of Neoclassicists such as the political painter Jacques
Louis David (1748-1825) and other ruling members of the French
Academy who had reigned unchallenged. Broader in outlook than their
German counterparts, French Romantic artists did not restrict themselves
to landscape and the occasional genre
painting, but also explored portrait
art and history painting.

Another strand of 19th-century Romanticism
explored by French artists was Orientalist
painting, typically of genre scenes in North Africa. Among the finest
exponents were the academician Jean-Leon
Gerome (1824-1904) as well as the more maverick Eugene Delacroix.

The first major Romantic painter in France
was Jaques-Louis David's top pupil - Antoine-Jean
Gros (1771-1835). The chronicler of Napoleon's campaigns and an accomplished
portraitist, Gros was associated with the academic style of painting,
although he also had a significant influence on both Gericault and Delacroix.

Theodore
Gericault (1791-1824) was an important pioneer of the Romantic art
movement in France. His masterpiece Raft of the Medusa (1819, Louvre)
was the scandal of the 1820 Paris Salon.
No painter until then had depicted horror so graphically. The impact of
the painting was all the more effective for being based on a true-life
disaster. Gericault's powerfully arranged composition forcefully undermined
the calculated, intellectual painting of academic Neoclassicism. The three-dimensionality
of the figures, allied to the meticulous arrangement of the raft, with
its symbolic hopelessness. This symbolic portrayal of a shipwreck (of
popular political aspirations) gives the painting the same drama that
marked the works of Baroque Old Masters like Rubens and Velazquez. Gericault
also adopted a Romantic approach to his famous portraits of asylum inmates.

Eugene
Delacroix (1798-1863), who later became the leader of French Romanticism,
followed in Gericault's footsteps after the latter's early demise, painting
pictures whose vivid colours and impetuous brushwork were designed to
stimulate the emotions and stir the soul. In doing this he deliberately
rekindled the centuries-old argument about the primacy of drawing or colour
composition. Delacroix countered what he considered to be 'Neoclasssical
dullness' - exemplified, as far as he was concerned, by Jean
Auguste Dominique Ingres (1780-1867) and the conservative French Academy
- with dynamic motion, and a colour-based composition not unlike that
of Titian or Rubens. His masterpiece in the Romantic style is Liberty
Leading the People (1830, Louvre), painted on the occasion of
the 1830 Revolution.

Delacroix was also an avid student of colour
in painting, in particular the interaction of colour and light. He
discovered that "flesh only has its true colour in the open air,
and particularly in the sun. If a man holds his head to the window, it
is quite different from within the room; herein lies the stupidity of
studio studies, which strive to reproduce the wrong colour". One
important result of his studies was the discovery that nuances of colour
can be produced by mixing complementary primary colours - a fact which
was taken up with great interest by the Impressionists. As it was, Delacroix
himself was heavily influenced by John Constable, the great English landscape
artist, who also had a huge impact on the painters of the 'Barbizon school',
near Fontainebleu, who devoted themselves to plein-air painting in the
1830s.

Other French artists who worked in the
tradition of Romanticism include: Pierre-Paul Prud'hon (1758-1823), Anne-Louis
Girodet-Trioson (1767-1824), Francois Gerard (1770-1837), George Michel
(1763-1843), Antoine-Jean Gros (1771-1835) and Jean-Baptiste-Camille
Corot (1796-1875). An unusual case is the classical history painter
Paul Delaroche (1797-1856),
who specialized in melodramatic historical scenes typically featuring
English royalty, such as the Execution of Lady Jane Grey (1833,
National Gallery, London). Immensely popular during his life, he made
a fortune from selling engravings of his pictures.

In America, the Romantic history-painting
tradition of Delacroix was maintained by the German-American artist
Emanuel Gottlieb
Leutze (1816-68) whose masterpiece is Washington Crossing the
Delaware (1851, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York).

Romanticism in
England (c.1820-1850)

John
Constable (1776-1837) belonged to an English tradition of Romanticism
that rejected compositions marked by a heightened idealisation of nature,
such as those of Caspar David Friedrich, in favour of the naturalism
of 17th century Dutch Baroque art, and
also that of Claude Lorrain (1604-82). This tradition sought a balance
between (on the one hand) a deep sensitivity to nature and (on the other)
advances in the science of painting and drawing. The latter were exemplified
by the systematic sky and cloud studies of the 1820s which characterized
the work of Constable. Precise observation of nature led him to disregard
the conventional importance of line, and construct his works from free
patches of colour.

This emancipation of colour is particularly
characteristic of the painting of William
Turner (1775-1851). For Turner, arguably the greatest of all English
painters of Romanticism, observation of nature is merely one element in
the realisation of his own pictorial ambitions. The mood of his paintings
is created less by what he painted than by how he painted, especially
how he employed colour and his paint-brush. Many of his canvases are painted
with rapid slashes. Thick impasto
alternates with delicate alla prima painting, tonal painting with
strong contrasts of light and dark. It often takes a while for the depicted
object to emerge from this whirling impression of colour and material.
Thus for instance in his painting Snowstorm: Steam-Boat off a Harbour's
Mouth (1842, Tate, London), Turner did not try to depict the driving
snow and lashing wind, but rather translated them into the language of
painting. In this, Turner is an important precursor of modern abstract
painting. More immediately, his art had a huge impact on the Impressionists,
who, unlike Romantic painters, were realists - they were not interested
in visions of light that heightened expressiveness but in real light effects
in nature. This movement towards realism appeared around 1850. At this
point, a widening gulf opened up between emotion and reality. The Romantics,
including groups like the Pre-Raphaelites,
focused on emotion, fantasy and artistically created worlds - a style
very much in tune with the era of Victorian art
(1840-1900) - an excellent example being the highly popular sentimental
portraits of dogs by Sir Edwin
Landseer (1802-73). By comparison, the Realists adhered to
a more naturalistic idiom, encompassing such diverse styles as French
Realism (with socially-aware themes) and Impressionism.

The Romantic style of painting stimulated the emergence of numerous schools,
such as: the Barbizon
school of plein-air landscapes, the Norwich
school of landscape painters; the Nazarenes, a group of Catholic German
and Austrian painters; Symbolism (eg. Arnold
Bocklin 1827-1901) and the Aestheticism movement.

The most influential exponents of English
figurative romanticism during the Victorian Age were the members of the
Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, co-founded by William
Holman Hunt (1827-1910) and by Dante
Gabriel Rossetti (1828-82), noted for The Annunciation and
other works. Other artists associated with the movement included: John
Everett Millais (1829-96) best-known for his romantic painting Ophelia,
Edward Burne-Jones
(1833-1898) the eminent painter, stained glass and tapestry designer for
William Morris & Co, and John
William Waterhouse (1849-1917) who created the famous painting of
The Lady of Shalott.

Another important group of Romantic painters
was The Hudson River
School of landscape painting,
active during the period 1825-1875. Begun by Thomas Doughty whose peaceful
compositions greatly influenced later artists of the school, other members
included Thomas Cole (dramatic
and vivid landscapes) Asher B Durand, Frederick
Edwin Church, JF Kensett, SFB Morse, Henry Inman, and Jasper Cropsey.
A sub-group of Hudson River artists introduced the style of Luminism,
active 1850-75. Luminist landscapes - exemplified by those of Frederic
E Church, Albert Bierstadt,
and the Missouri frontier painter George
Caleb Bingham (1811-79) - were characterized by intense, often dramatic
light effects, a style visible also in the hauntingly beautiful works
of Whistler, such as Crepuscule
in Flesh Colour and Green, Valparaiso (1866) and Nocturne: Blue
and Silver - Chelsea (1871).

Greatest Romantic
Paintings

Works of Romanticism hang in many of the
best art museums around the world. Here
is a short selected list of works.

In Paris during the early 1920s, a group
of figurative painters appeared whose brooding paintings quickly became
labelled Neo-Romantic. Among them were the Russian born trio of Eugene
Berman and his brother Leonid, and Pavel Tchelitchew.
However, in British fine art at least, the term Neo-Romantic denotes the
imaginative quasi-abstract style of landscape created by Paul
Nash (1889-1946) and Graham
Sutherland (1903-80) and others during the late 1930s and 1940s.
Inspired in part by the visionary landscapes of William Blake and
Samuel Palmer, Neo-Romantic pictures often included figures, was
typically sombre in mood, but sometimes displayed a striking intensity.
Other important Neo-Romantics included Michael Ayrton, John Craxton, Ivon
Hitchens, John Minton, John Piper, Keith Vaughan.

 For other art movements and periods,
see: History of Art.
 For styles of painting and sculpture, see: Homepage.